


It is for wives to stare at the sea and wait

by LorienofLoth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 10:43:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7931608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LorienofLoth/pseuds/LorienofLoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Argella Durrandon stares at the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It is for wives to stare at the sea and wait

**Author's Note:**

> I was reading A World Of Ice and Fire, and felt compelled to do a little character exploration. So Argella Durrandon. Apologies for any errors/typos/total nonsense that may appear

            Argella Durrandon goes regularly to Durran’s Point to stare at the sea and wait. Her guardsmen, her castellan and her ladies do not wait at the Point with her, although she is escorted even there. Perhaps, if she fought, if she argued or spoke politely, as the wife of a Lord Paramount, and the ruler in practice of a realm, she would be allowed to go to Durran’s Point alone. Or perhaps she would not be allowed to go at all.

                They do not matter, anyway, the guards and ladies who go with her, who think—what do they think? Do they think she stares at the sea and awaits her husband, that she is as some tragic lady from the tales? As a girl, she had loved the tales of the sea, more powerful than any man, saving and destroying as it would, and of Allia of the Point, who had washed up at Durran’s Point after a storm so fierce that not one ship that had left Storm’s End had returned. Prince Durran had thought her so beautiful and so clearly beloved by the Seven that they had married days later. Argella wonders now, as she never did as a girl, where Allia was from before she washed up at the Point, if she ever just wanted to go home, or if she was happy as the Storm Queen.

                Argella does not stare at the sea wishing for husband to come home. Argella Durrandon stares at the sea because there is nothing more beautiful than the sea in a fury—and nothing more powerful.

                If, and she imagines it now, staring at the waters, a dragon—perhaps Balerion, the Black Dread himself—were to fly into the sea in a storm, when the winds howl and the waves rage, all of that strength and fire would be wasted, lost in a battle with a force far stronger than itself.

If waves came crashing into Storm’s End, came further up the cliffs than they ever have before, lashed at the walls of the castle itself, would Storm’s End stand, or would it crumble and fall into the sea? Argella can see it, the great castle, so cleverly, cunningly built, filling with water as its walls collapse around her. Her children are there too, of course, for where else would the heir to the Stormlands and his young sister be, and they too are trapped in the falling castle, are held under water where they can only choke and splutter and drown, are dragged under into the deeps as saltwater burns in her lungs. The line of Durrandon would end in a storm, as it should, and the Gods would be grieved no more.

Would it be faster than burning alive, Argella wonders, or slower?

The day is not cold, but the winds are blowing as they do, and they are harsh. Argella draws her cloak around herself. When they first arrived, her husband’s men were recognisable by the way they hunched into themselves when the wind blew, how they slipped on the wet ground of the cliffs. Some of the men who came with her now are those who came with her husband to Storm’s End and even now they stay far back from the cliff’s edge. Argella hates them for that, but she still prefers them to her father’s men, who walk the cliffs as she does.

If Storm’s End went crumbling into the sea, that wouldn’t save them though. They would drown with her and her children.

Her husband’s men wouldn’t survive either, of course, but he is in Dorne, far beyond the reach of the wrath of the sea and when he came back—if he ever comes back, if he doesn’t die in the heat of a southern summer without ever setting foot in Storm’s End again—there would be only water where his castle should have been. Where his wife should have been. Where his children should have been.

Argella smiles at the sea, on the cliff-top that alone in all of the Stormlands is still hers.

If he did die under the Dornish sun, bitten by scorpions or dying of thirst or just killed by some Dornishman, if he did never come back to Storm’s End, what would change? Lyonel Baratheon is heir to the Stormlands, would rule Storm’s End if his father never came home—unless the sea rises, and Argella knows it will not, knows Storm’s End was built to weather any storm—and Westeros would move on. She cannot destroy Storm’s End, as much as she dreams standing on the cliff-side, she cannot do anything but watch the sea and wait until she cannot even hobble along the cliff-side anymore.

Or she could go into the sea. That is her other option, of course, and that is why the guards come with her. Her husband thought she might jump off the cliffs. Maybe she would have.

And yet, she is the last of her line. The last of house Durrandon. Once she is dead, if she cannot take Storm’s End with her—and she cannot, her men and her husband’s men and her husband’s king proved that when she tried—then it will belong to her husband and his children and his king.

So after watching the sea some more, Argella Durrandon turns around and goes home again.


End file.
